SOURCE: Gysin, Fritz. “John Edgar Wideman's ‘Fever’.” Callaloo 22, no. 3 (summer 1999): 715-26.

“Telling the story right will make it read.”

(Damballah)

“Certain things had to have happened for any of it to make sense.”

(Philadelphia Fire)

“Fever” is the title story of a book that heralds Wideman's imaginative return to Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love,” whose hypocritical failure to fulfill that promise in the 20th century he had already tried to expose in The Lynchers (1973) before he had found his unique voice in a series of novels located in his native Pittsburgh, especially The Homewood Trilogy (1985). It is under heavy personal pressure that Wideman wrote Reuben (1987), his novel about a black outsider who becomes a lawyer to the poor in Pittsburgh, and then published Fever [Fever: Twelve Stories], his second book about Philadelphia. Wideman has been widely praised for his powerful language, his imaginative use of myth and ritual when dealing with the past, and his sensitive approach to characterization and focalization. If our knowledge of his biography contributes anything to our understanding of his fiction, it is an awareness of the depths of experience, of its existential and emotional complexity that are the origins of his narrative vigor.

“Fever” is a fascinating collage of communal voices and visions, commemorating the black experience of suffering and triumph during the yellow fever epidemic that hit the city of Philadelphia in 1793, with occasional glances back to the American Revolution and forward to the 1980s. It is, as the author himself has noted, a “meditation on history” (Fever 162),¹ albeit one that differs greatly from Sherley Anne Williams' story with a similar title.² Its two epigraphs announce the author's intentions and some of his figurative strategies. The first one is an ironic dedication to Matthew Carey, the Irish immigrant publisher and official chronicler of the disease, whose potboiler contained derogatory remarks denying the unselfish and indispensable contribution of the black nurses, carters, and undertakers to the fight against the plague (Carey 76ff.); the second quotes an earlier comment by the wealthy merchant Richard Morris on the central position of Philadelphia which is “to the United States what the heart is to the human body in circulating the blood” (127). Relying on contemporary responses of those African Americans denigrated by Carey, as well as on more recent historical evaluations, the author once again intends to set the record straight by selecting and collecting snippets from old texts, some white, but most black, and by associating them with recreated fragments of scenes, reports, stories, comments, arguments, insights from the past and the present. By means of an imaginative yet tightly controlled blending of tropes, he sketches a vision of the personified temporary capital of the United States as the victim of an affliction whose origins and meaning are extended far beyond the fields of medicine, science, and politics.

One's understanding of this story is helped considerably by a certain familiarity with the history of the plague, some issues involved in the fight against it, and a familiarity with a few historical characters. The epidemic of 1793, according to the sources mentioned by the author, was the first and most devastating outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia and caused the worst crisis in the history of the city. Having started in late July, the disease assumed epidemic proportions in late August, and by the middle of September the city had almost surrendered. Whereas the rich and the middle class, together with many federal civil servants and high public officers, fled to the countryside where some of them survived, the poor, especially blacks and immigrants, suffered most. Living in congested and highly infested areas and unable to leave or pay for medical care, they soon succumbed in droves (Nash 121-22). Those citizens choosing to remain, for altruistic or business reasons, performed feats of heroism in helping to maintain a certain degree of order and sanity, in organizing relief from outside, in combating “the dismal monotony of the plague” (Powell 233) by investigating its possible origins and reasons, and in ministering to the needs of the sick and dying. The height of the calamity was reached in mid-October with 119 persons dying on a single day (Powell 234); after that the fever slowly abated and the November frosts finally brought an end to the epidemic.

During those fateful hundred days much speculation took place regarding the origins of the plague; lots of advice was published as to how to prevent contagion; and, above all, veritable battles were fought by doctors representing different medical traditions and propagating, as well as practicing, controversial forms of treatment. One of the hottest cities on the eastern seaboard, Philadelphia was surrounded by stagnant swamps, was bordered by putrid river banks, and it virtually sat on a noxious cesspool (Powell vi)—enough reason for the so-called “climatists” to argue that, during a long, hot summer such as the one of 1793, its citizens were easily infected by poisonous effluvia from the “sinks” and that therefore sanitary measures such as cleaning up the filth in streets and houses, airing rooms, making fires and burning gunpowder might help to contain the disease. Others insisted on transmission by touch or breath and claimed that the source of the plague came from outside, from the West Indies, especially from Santo Domingo where a few months earlier a slave uprising commandeered by French Jacobin commissioners had helped the free black soldiers take over the city of Cap Français and had caused the flight of some 4000 whites together with their 2000 slaves and a number of rich free mulattos on board a French fleet, many of whom had found shelter in Philadelphia (Nash 140-42). The so-called “contagionists” among the medical profession recommended the isolation of the sick and cautioned against touching victims dead or alive unless one was protected by rags or clothes drenched in vinegar and camphor (Powell 36-44). Yet nobody at that time was aware of the real transmitter of the plague, the female species of a mosquito known as Aëdes aegypti, which, once it had bitten a yellow fever victim, was able to infect another human being every three days until it would be killed by frost (Powell vii-viii). It was not until 1912 when Walter Reed made this crucial discovery that the yellow fever ceased to be a recurring affliction in American cities.

Ironically, Philadelphia, during the time of its first yellow fever epidemic, was the center of medical knowledge in America (Powell ix). Among the many doctors who looked after the sick, dissected the dead, and, incidentally, made quite a bit of money, Benjamin Rush was an exception. Headstrong and energetic, yet compassionate and sensitive, indefatigable in his investigation into the cause of the sickness as well as in his attendance upon rich and poor victims alike, Dr. Rush derived most of his professional prestige from the fight against this plague despite the fact that his cure through excessive bleeding and purging by means of mercury probably caused as many deaths as it saved lives. At the same time, the strange dichotomy between his high medical competence and cheerfulness and his almost obsessive exclusion of other cures except his own made him one of the most controversial colleagues in the profession (Powell 114-39). In the light of Rush's showmanship, milder and less spectacular forms of treatment by expert foreign doctors barely stood a chance. Dr. Jean Devèze, for example, the French medical officer from Cap Français whose studies in Bordeaux and Paris were at least equal to the American doctor's training in Edinburgh and whose experience in the West Indies had made him an authority on the yellow fever, was equally successful by merely prescribing stimulants and quinine, but if it had not been for the intercession of a compatriot, his services would have been spurned by the authorities.

Dr. Devèze's employment was connected with the establishment of the first and only emergency hospital outside the city at Bush Hill, the spacious mansion that the Guardians of the Poor had commandeered as a pesthouse after the hospital and the almshouse had been barred to the fever victims. When on September 10 the unflagging Mayor Mathew Clarkson was forced to run the town with a committee of volunteers, one of their first tasks was to clean up the filth and corruption at Bush Hill which had quickly degenerated into a site of scandalous neglect, intemperance, and unimaginable atrocities, frightening Philadelphians more than the disease itself (Jones and Allen 9). Stephen Girard, a prosperous French merchant, and Peter Helm, a pious German cooper, volunteered for the job; they quickly organized the cleaning and airing of the rooms, separated the sick from the dying, improved sanitary conditions, replaced inept and depraved attendants, and, above all, installed a team of two resident doctors, one of whom was Devèze. The establishment of a lazaretto at Bush Hill was one of the first signs of organized resistance against the terror of the plague; its success helped the besieged citizens believe that the affliction could eventually be overcome (Powell 140-72).

Yet all these efforts would probably have failed if it had not been for the contribution of Philadelphia's Free Black citizens. During the first month of the plague, it had seemed that African Americans were immune, and so there had been a great demand for (largely untrained) black nurses in white homes stricken with the disease. When the remaining whites were no longer capable of performing the most basic services to the starving poor and those sick and dying in the streets, Benjamin Rush, who was an ardent abolitionist and a great friend of “the race,” implored some of his friends in the Free African Society to take charge of the relief forces. The Society met on September 5. Dr. Rush's request was considered an opportunity to demonstrate black courage and cooperation; and the next day, with the official blessing of the mayor, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and William Gray not only organized a small army of black carters, grave diggers, and nurses, but they themselves received special training by Rush and then worked along with him as auxiliary doctors, administering purges, bleeding patients, and making careful notes about each case. These tasks they continued even when the idea of black immunity turned out to be an illusion (Nash 122-24).

The cheerfulness and reliability with which these black volunteers carried out their self-imposed duties was a testimony not only to African-American dignity but also to the sense of importance and moral strength that this particular Free Black community had achieved in the preceding decades. It had found early expression during the Revolutionary War when, in contrast to the many slaves who joined the British side because they were promised their immediate freedom, the sixteen-year old “Free Negro” James Forten, a prisoner on an English ship, had expressed his patriotism by spurning the captain's offer of free passage to England and patronage of the captain's family and therefore had been committed to the Old Jersey, “a rotting death-trap prison ship anchored in New York harbor where thousands of Americans died” (Nash 52). But above all, it had lately found expression in the religious activities of Allen and Jones, in their attempts to found separate black churches. A year before the plague struck, these two men were denied their customary seats at a service celebrating the new expansion of St. George's Methodist Church and were ordered to sit in a segregated area, despite the fact that African Americans had contributed money and labor to the renovation. Absalom Jones was not even allowed to finish his prayer. This confrontation precipitated their own separatist efforts; in March 1793 Allen turned the first sod for the building that eventually was to become St. Thomas African Methodist Church (Nash 109-21); the famous roof-raising banquet during which blacks and whites in turn waited upon each other took place in mid-August; Nash calls it an “early display of the separate-but-equal doctrine” (Nash 121). When St. Thomas turned Episcopal and Richard Allen withdrew to found his own Bethel Methodist Church, Jones was appointed its minister. Thus when the African Society in September offered its services to the mayor, its members could count on a certain degree of respect among the better-educated whites, and it was probably also due to this respect that their refutation of Mathew Carey's denigrating remarks (Jones and Allen 3ff.) was at least partially successful.

It stands to reason that an urban crisis of such magnitude cannot be captured by means of one of the conventional short story patterns, especially not if in addition the author intends to reconstruct its racial dimension. Wideman wisely dispenses with a linear plot and a character portrait, instead choosing a different pattern, a combination of single textual units, which careful selection, deliberate fragmentation, and associative arrangement has made representative of a wealth of similar happenings and experiences. The synecdochic effect is enhanced by the frequent elimination of the names of characters, focalizers, or narrators, who thus either seem exchangeable or are made to stand for typical experiences, attitudes, or moods. Of the thirty-five sections, about one-third can be connected in one way or another to Richard Allen who thus appears as the writer of his and Jones' Narrative (128, 129) as an internal focalizer (133, 156), as a character described by one of his brothers (139), as a homodiegetic narrator (144, 146, 148), as a letter-writer (19), and even, depending on one's interpretation, as the author of the story (142). If one adds the six sections in which Allen functions as the addressee in the discourse of Master Abraham, an old Jewish merchant, the sections related to him comprise about half of the entire number. The remaining sections may be attributed to James Forten in 1782 (143), to Benjamin Rush (147), to a slave on the Middle Passage or in a boat escaping from Santo Domingo (130), to a wise old African slave (131), to an old African American at the close of the Civil War (155), to a young black male nurse in an old age asylum of the 1980s (159), and to a heterodiegetic narrator who cites definitions (129, 130, 156), gives objective reports from a modern vantage point (128, 147, 159), or begins and closes the story with cryptic remarks that are even more ambiguous than some of the other sections (127, 160, 161). Whereas the rapid shift of narrators and focalizers appears to place the story securely in the tradition of American modernism (Eliot, Dos Passos, Faulkner), the wide generic range of the different textual units and their extremely fragmentary quality are strongly reminiscent of Melville's Moby Dick and, together with the striking oscillations of narrative distance and the frequent absence of the focalizer's or even the narrator's identity, give it the quality of a postmodern montage.

“Fever” draws much of its energy from the tension between closed and open form. One of the most fascinating aspects of this collage is Wideman's ability to treat the textual fragments as singular voices and then to make these voices interact and echo each other so that a fascinating kind of communal song emerges which manages to overcome the single experiences of anxiety and apprehension, the ordeals of pain and suffering by means of a sober and dignified celebration of black bravery and selfless dedication. Maybe this is what an early reviewer means when she speaks of the “oddly impartial narrators” of Wideman's book who “seem to be looking down upon the planet with genuine omniscience” and who “speak with the neutrality of gods” (Schaeffer 30). In this particular story, however, the narrative situation is more complex; underneath the celebratory tone, one can always recognize the counterpoint of a dazed, apathetic, almost fatalistic strain which occasionally rises to heights of caustic comment or descends into depths of oracular rumblings. Paradoxically, it is on such a note that the story begins and ends. And thus, we are never allowed forget that, whereas the biological epidemic may be survived, suppressed, or eventually prevented, the spiritual plague, the inner sickness, will merely change signifiers. Yet, before looking for messages or meanings in this story, it will be helpful to single out some of the structural devices by means of which the tension between open and closed form is maintained.³

Although “Fever” has no linear plot, it is nevertheless possible to recognize tendencies towards coherence within particular textual clusters. If we ignore the introduction, sections reporting on the development of the epidemic loosely follow the chronological sequence of the fever as outlined above. Even those sections, or parts of sections, dealing with other events appear in more or less chronological order, analeptic passages generally preceding proleptic ones. Additional coherence is achieved by means of underlying formal devices such as bracketing and repetition. These are easily recognized in the cluster of sections devoted—or attributable—to Richard Allen, but they are typical of the entire text.

After two quotations from his and Absalom Jones' Narrative, giving a neutral description of the course of the disease in single patients, Allen appears for the first time in person as an internal focalizer in the ninth and longest section of the story (133-39), and this section has a sequel toward the end of the text (30:156-59). At the close of a long and strenuous day of exhausting visits, the preacher reaches the Black area beyond Water Street where the poorest and most desolate of his patients are found (beginning of section 9). Braving darkness, stench, and squeaking rats, he ventures into a dilapidated cellar hole and rescues the twin babies of a dead couple from Santo Domingo (end of section 30). If we read the two sections together, these episodes serve as a kind of parenthesis, enclosing a number of drastic experiences and Allen's reflections upon them. In the same way the two sections themselves may be said to function as a frame, embracing most of the other sections related to Allen, which then may be taken for the musings of a more omniscient narrator retracing the preacher's steps and perhaps identifying with him. Careful reading will reveal several parentheses of this kind containing Allen's flashbacks and reflections. The reminiscence tracing his religious development, for example, is circumscribed by his musings on the precarious situation of “his people” living in the border area between Water Street and the banks of the Delaware (9:136-39). Similarly, his second-hand account of the burning of Cap Français and the ensuing flight of masters and slaves begins and ends with the description of his arrival at Bush Hill (12:142-43). A related use of brackets can be observed in the way fragments with anachronous actions or focalizers are embraced by pairs of sections sharing the same topic.⁴

Repetition is indispensable with a collage of such disparate fragments. Characters, events, episodes, conspicuous items, and facts are referred to at least twice but usually more often. As angles of perception shift so radically among the fragments, such repetitions, apart from tying the fragments together, often add additional aspects or characteristics to the repeated items which thus function as variations on a theme or as echoes recalling earlier experiences and moods. The use of echoes especially creates striking effects and introduces an additional dimension to the text. Richard Allen's long flashback in section 9 culminates in the confrontation at St. George's Methodist Church; his rapt vision of a slave rebellion is rudely interrupted by a voice which he first takes to be that of God but then quickly recognizes as that of a white church elder:

Allen, Allen. Do you hear me? You and your people must not kneel at the front of the gallery. On your feet. Come. Come. Now. On your feet.

(9:138)⁵

Many pages later, the (repeated) call is echoed by a different voice, that of Dr. Rush:

Allen, Allen, he called to me. Observe how even after death, the body rejects this bloody matter from nose and bowel and mouth.

(20:148)

And the echo returns twice, the second time diminished, on the next page:

Allen, Allen. He lasted only moments and then I wrapped him in a sheet from the chest at the foot of his canopied bed. We lifted him into a humbler litter, crudely nailed together, the lumber still green. Allen, look. Stench from the coffin cut through the oppressive odors permeating this doomed household. See. Like an infant the master of the house had soiled his swaddling clothes.

(20:149)

The echoes retain some of the abruptness of the initial call, which—we remember—tears Allen out of a trance-like state, and so they indirectly evoke a similar condition in the later section. The seamless shifts from speaker (Rush) to first person narrator (Allen) indicate the preacher's continual withdrawal into a meditative mood, out of which he is twice abruptly torn by Rush's clinically detached observations.

In a similar way the oracular statement summing up James Forten's status on the boundary between life and death on his prison ship in New York harbor (13:143) is echoed in section 24 where it divides old Master Abraham's death-bed “confessions” into two equal parts, or it may be said to be embraced by them:

The dead are legion, the living a froth on dark layered depths.

(24:153)

Here again the echo serves to maintain the mood of meditation in the midst of six forceful and rather sarcastic sections, in which the skeptical old Jew urges Allen to save his hide and abandon a useless struggle, useless because of the repetitiousness of God's creation:

You do know, don't you, Allen, that God is a bookseller? He publishes one book—the text of suffering—over and over again. He disguises it between new boards, in different shapes and sizes, prints on varying papers, in many fonts, adds prefaces and postscripts to deceive the buyer, but it's always the same book.

(26:154-55)

A third formal device of considerable impact is the telescoping of experiences, again a process necessary in a story that has to hold so many different fragments together. This device, however, works in opposite ways, on the one hand condensing material and thus contributing to a more coherent text, on the other hand pulling elements into the text that threaten to break its unity or that reach out in different directions. Allen's remembrance of his religious development is a case in point: the black migration to the North, his trance-like dream of a slave insurrection, his being ordered to the back of the church, and his subsequent founding of two African houses of worship in a row are all told of in one breath, as it were, connecting the story of the plague with the much longer and even more calamitous story of African-American suffering (9:137-38). The most striking example of such a telescoping of events is section 34 in which the seamless transformation of one voice into another, which we have noticed above (section 20), seems to pull the reader right out of the story and set him down in the middle of Wideman's next novel:

Almost an afterthought. The worst, he believed, had been overcome. Only a handful of deaths the last weeks of November. The city was recovering. Commerce thriving. Philadelphia must be revictualed, refueled, rebuilt, reconnected to the countryside, to markets foreign and domestic, to products, pleasures and appetites denied during the quarantine months of the fever. A new century would soon be dawning. We must forget the horrors. The Mayor proclaims a new day. Say let's put the past behind us. Of the eleven who died in the fire he said extreme measures were necessary as we cleansed ourselves of disruptive influences. The cost could have been much greater, he said I regret the loss of life, especially the half dozen kids, but I commend all city officials, all volunteers who helped return the city to the arc of glory that is its proper destiny.

(34:160-61)

“The Mayor” speaking is no longer Mathew Clarkson but W. Wilson Goode, the first black mayor of Philadelphia, who ordered the fire bombing of the home of an Afrocentric nature cult in 1985 (Bray 7). With this bold move, Wideman uses the device of telescoping to reach out to the present and remind the reader that as far as Black pain and anguish are concerned, things in the former stronghold of the Quakers have gone from bad to worse.

The search for the meaning of “Fever” is made difficult by the variety of fragments accumulated; insights and statements vary just as much as the views uttered about the origins of the fever and the methods of treatment. The most straightforward comment about the origins of the plague, which tempts us to take it as the message of the story, is expressed by the voice of a wise old African who still “receives his wisdom from pagan drums in pagan forests”:

We have bred the affliction within our breasts … Fever grows in the secret places of our hearts, planted there when one of us decided to sell one of us to another. The drum must pound ten thousand years to drive that evil away.

(8:132-33)

He illustrates this with imagery, inverting the theory of the contagionists and turning that of the climatists “outside in”: just as the city of Philadelphia is “held in the water's palm” (8:131), human beings, “ancestors and children, neighbors and strangers,” are connected by water. The fever, he claims, occurs when we let the water of empathic communication become polluted, “clogged up with filth … Then we are dry and cracked as a desert country, vital parts wither, all dust and dry bones inside. Fever is a drought consuming us from within” (8:132). To change the metaphor, the fever is a result of our refusal to accept the fact that, beneath their skins, blacks and whites look the same, as we can learn from the first report of the autopsy of a plague victim: “When you open the dead, black or white, you find: the dura mater covering the brain is white and fibrous in appearance …” (17:146. Cf. Schaeffer 30).⁶ Yet, fascinating as it is in its combination of lucid message and oracular prediction, the old African's voice is but one in a chorus; the wisdom culled from his stories about other plagues becomes one fragmentary tale interacting with other tales, and the meaning of the whole is hidden in the interactions of its parts.

As a matter of fact, if there is one “voice” that predominates, it is that of Richard Allen. Most of the stories told, or told about, in the text seem to converge in his consciousness or that of a narrator focusing through him, as pointed out earlier. In contrast to the doctors who analyze the dead, he claims that his knowledge about the fever comes from the dying: “When lancet and fleam bleed the victims, they offer up stories like prayers” (15:145-46). His way of digesting these stories is that of a writer: “I recite the story many, many times to myself, let many voices speak to me till one begins to sound like the sea or rain or my feet those mornings shuffling through thick dust” (11:142). The speaker here describes a creative process. But his is a special kind of writing or talking; in contrast to the old African he is not able to explain things because they are too complex, too confusing, for the logical mind; his talk, as a matter of fact, is as fragmentary as the text we read:

He'd begun with no preamble. Our conversation taken up again directly as if the months since our last meeting were no more than a cobweb his first words lightly brush away. I say conversation but a better word would be soliloquy because I was only a listener, a witness learning his story, a story buried so deeply he couldn't recall it, but dreamed pieces, a conversation with himself, a reverie with the power to sink us both into its unreality. So his first words did not begin the story where I remembered him ending it in our last session, but picked up midstream the ceaseless play of voices only he heard, always, summoning him, possessing him, enabling him to speak, to be.

(10:140)

What Allen's brother is trying to describe here is the hallucinatory quality of this speech: a soliloquy of fragments erupting from and receding into a continuous flow, a “buried story,” a subtext engraved in Allen's unconscious and thrown up in jumbles reminiscent of a feverish dream. Thus Allen—and through him, Wideman—tells the story of the fever in the language of the fever.

This language draws its strength from another source of the unconscious: complex and confusing images which themselves seem to be fragments of an unfathomable texture zoomed to various stages of awareness. One example must suffice: Allen remembers watching his face in a mirror and experiencing it as “a garden ruined overnight, pillaged, overgrown, trampled by marauding beasts”—a sign that he has lost control, a sign, also, of the power of the fever to transform “even the familiar” (9:134), “to alter suddenly what it touched” (9:135). And just as under the spell of the fever, his personality threatens to disintegrate, so does the city. The anthropomorphic imagery connects the city with the face, foregrounding problems of skin and thus hinting at an intricate preoccupation with boundaries:

Membranes that preserved the integrity of substances and shapes, kept each in its proper place, were worn thin. He could poke his finger through yellowed skin. A stone wall. The eggshell of his skull. What should be separated was running together. Threatened to burst. Nothing contained the way it was supposed to be. No clear lines of demarcation. A mongrel city. Traffic where there shouldn't be traffic. An awful void opening around him, preparing itself to hold explosions of bile, vomit, gushing bowels, ooze, sludge, seepage.

(9:135)

Paradoxically, the evocative metaphors indicating Allen's consternation at the disappearance of boundaries are juxtaposed with equally strong tropes condemning the borderlines that prevent black immigrants from becoming part of the city.⁷ This fluctuation between affirmation and rejection of boundaries, between fear of a “mongrel city” and dedication to the mongrel crowd at its margins, coming, as it does, in the wake of mirror imagery, suggesting an identity crisis, seems to me to be connected with the experience of the Philadelphia fever as a liminal phenomenon, a case of the boundary functioning as a threshold, as a (temporary) locus of transformation.⁸

The confusion of values accompanying the process and progress of the fever puts people such as Richard Allen to a severe test.⁹ Why he passes it, and what gives him the strength to “do the right thing,” is suggested by an equally mysterious image in the proleptic report on his autopsy in the last section of the text:

When they cut him open, the one who decided to stay, to be a beacon and a steadfast, they will find: liver (1720 grams), spleen (150 grams), … heart (380 grams) and right next to his heart, the miniature hand of a child, frozen in a grasping gesture, fingers like hard tongues of flame, still reaching for the marvel of the beating heart, fascinated still, though the heart is cold, beats not, the hand as curious about this infinite stillness as it was about thump and heat and quickness.

(35:161)

It is the blending of sensitivity and control, vision and compassion, that makes for the power of Wideman's verbal imagery. The Biblical cadences of these concluding lines are suggestive of a celebration of death that promises the ultimate triumph of life.

Notes

1. Page numbers within parentheses refer to John Edgar Wideman, Fever (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1989). The Penguin edition of 1991 has the same pagination.

2. “Meditations on History,” Midnight Birds: Stories of Contemporary Black Women Writers, ed. Mary Helen Washington (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1980), 200-48. And as such it is also different from Freneau's and Whittier's poetry on this plague, as well as from Charles Brockden Brown's use of it as a background in three of his novels.

3. For the sake of convenience, I have numbered the sections. Section numbers appear in parentheses in the text, usually before the colon that introduces page numbers.

4. Cf. also the predominantly neutral account of the plague by two quotations from Allen's and Jones' Narrative (2-4:128-29; Jones and Allen 16), the definitions of yellow fever and aëdes aegypti embracing the episode of the slave in the hold of the ship being stung by a mosquito (5-7:129-31), Allen's letter to his wife surrounded by two sections related to his dealing with Benjamin Rush (18-20:147-51), etc.

5. According to Richard Allen's autobiography, the person involved in this incident was not himself but his friend Absalom Jones (Nash 118). Wideman's decision to attribute it to Allen may have something to do with the repetitions of the (repeated) call.

6. That the deterioration from fever to fire can be seen as a result of this same moral failure is made obvious in section 32: “Yeah, I nurse these old funky motherfuckers, all right. White people, specially old white people, lemme tell you, boy, them peckerwoods stink” (32:159).

7. “Bones, skins, entrails, torn carcasses, unrecognizable tatters and remnants broomed into a neat ridge. … Beyond the tidal line of refuge, a pale margin lapped clean by receding waters. Then the iron river itself, flat, dark, speckled by sores of foam that puckered and swirled, worrying the stillness with a life of their own” (9:136); “He'd come here and preached to them. Thieves, beggars, loose women, debtors, fugitives, drunkards, gamblers, the weak, crippled and outcast with nowhere else to go. … Jesus had toiled among the wretched, the outcast, that flotsam and jetsam deposited like a ledge of filth on the banks of the city” (9:137); “The latest comers must always start here, on this dotted line, in this riot of alleys, lanes, tunnels. Wave after wave of immigrants unloaded here, winnowed here, dying in these shanties, grieving in strange languages. But white faces move on, bury their dead, bear their children, negotiate the invisible reef between this broken place and the foursquare town. Learn enough of their new tongue to say to the blacks they've left behind, thou shalt not pass” (9:139).

8. I have in mind a state similar to, but not quite the same as, Victor Turner's concept of liminality as defined in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: “Thus, for me, liminality represents the midpoint of transition in a status-sequence between two positions …”(Turner 237); “What I call liminality, the state of being in between successive participations in social milieux dominated by social structural considerations, whether formal or unformalized, is not precisely the same as communitas, for it is a sphere or domain of action or thought rather than a social modality” (Turner 52).

9. In section 20, for example, Allen contemplates his strange refusal to take advantage of the prevailing inversion of power: “Why did I not fly? Why was I not dancing in the streets, celebrating God's judgment on this wicked city? Fever made me freer than I'd ever been. Municipal government had collapsed. Anarchy ruled. As long as fever did not strike me I could come and go anywhere I pleased. … To be spared the fever was a chance for anyone, black or white, to be a king” (20:150-51).

Works Cited

Bray, Rosemary L. “‘The Whole City Seen the Flames.’” Review of Philadelphia Fire, by John E. Wideman. The New York Times Book Review (Sept. 1990): 7, 9.

Carey, Matthew. A Short Account of the Malignant Fever Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia … Philadelphia, 1793.

Jones, Absalom, and Richard Allen. A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793 … Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1794. Kraus Reprint, 1972.

Nash, Gary B. Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community 1720-1840. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Powell, J. H. Bring Out Your Dead. The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949.

Samuels, Wilfried D. “John Edgar Wideman.” Afro-American Fiction Writers After 1955. Vol. 33. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1978f. 271-78.

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